


The Sky Is Yellow

by angelinthecity



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Elio's POV, First Love, First Time, Flirting over telescopes, Fluff, Happy Ending, Kissing, M/M, Mr Perlman is an astronomy professor, Pining, Smut, astronomy au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:55:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23801926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelinthecity/pseuds/angelinthecity
Summary: One summer at an old observatory in upstate New York, an intern named Oliver wears cologne in an indecipherable pattern, and the seventeen-year-old Elio Perlman finds himself awakening like a precocious Moonglow pear.My heart pounded when he looked at me and he’d been saving his question for the past day and a half, just for this moment: “So. I make you nervous?”[COMPLETED Jun 18, 2020]
Relationships: Oliver/Elio Perlman
Comments: 475
Kudos: 388





	1. The Pear

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Небо желтого цвета](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27080533) by [Aira81](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aira81/pseuds/Aira81)



It sounds utterly ridiculous now, but I started out by hating him.

By despising the way he acted like he was no more of a stranger in that town than we were; the way he sat confidently at the dinner table even though he had only just arrived. The way he smiled jovially at my parents and repeated how grateful he was for everything—the food, the drink, the opportunity, the summer ahead of him—and yet, he barely looked in my direction. How arrogant from someone who would get my room for the next six weeks.

That was my fifth summer upstate. We had been going to the house since I was thirteen. My father had struck a deal with the owner, his colleague from the astronomy department at Columbia, that we could stay there for the month of July and most of August, provided we look after the quaint, outdated observatory come quaint, outdated astronomy museum that resided next to the house.

The deal had served us well thus far. We were in the outskirts of the town, far away enough from the main road that there was a visitor once or twice a month, at most, at the museum. And even those were usually just people who had gotten lost and were happily on their way again as soon as we had advised them to turn left, not right, at the old silo on the main road. And so we—my mother, my father, and I—could spend our summers in peace, on a beautiful hilltop and several hours away from the oppressive heat and humidity of Manhattan.

The peace was guaranteed until the summer of 1983 when my father had decided to take in an intern.

The intern was to help with both the upkeep of the museum and my father’s research, but I didn’t understand why he needed one in the first place. We had managed just fine before, and the intern wasn’t even from any of his classes at Columbia but a physics major from an obscure university in New Hampshire. It made no sense.

“Why are we taking a stranger here, to ruin our summer?” I had asked.

My father had explained, in his best professorial tone, that it’d be useful to have an extra pair of hands around to clean the old telescope and to file his articles that he could never keep track of.

“And he is also working on some kind of a thesis, so I’m sure he will be out of your way a lot.”

It turned out the intern was out of my way a lot. At the dinner on the first evening, he exchanged pleasantries with my mother and discussed the premise of his thesis with my father, and then he had been shown to his room, the second nicest bedroom in the house, while I had been downgraded to the small spare room across from him.

But after that, I barely saw him for the next two days. I suspected my father was getting him started in the observatory building across the yard, showing him his office on the ground floor and then proudly taking him to the museum space upstairs. I imagined my father showing him around the room, blowing dust off of the artifacts. They had been procured as donations from different institutes or personal collections of my father’s colleagues, and the _pièce de résistance_ was a large telescope.

It was an old model but it still worked perfectly, and it was my favorite thing in the whole place. Paradoxically, realizing how vast the universe was and in contrast, how small, isolated and alone the Earth, it made me feel less odd and less alone. I was a speck of dust in the eyes of others, but so was everyone else in the eyes of the great galaxy.

During the summers there, I didn’t mind being alone. I liked to read, and I played the piano that we had painstakingly moved into the house so that I could continue practicing. In the city, I didn’t mind solitude either, as long as I was allowed to blend in with the faceless crowds. It only got complicated when my parents asked me to socialize.

“ _Elio, why don’t you invite one of your classmates over this weekend_?” Or, “ _Elio, Mr. and Mrs. Greenberg are coming over for dinner and they are bringing Hannah. Surely you will try and keep her company_?”

I had tried, and the kids had been close to my age, or also played the piano, or were also only children, but they didn’t care for my jokes or my books and I didn’t understand their disregard for Bach. Time and time again, I came to the conclusion that I was less lonely in my own company.

My parents who socialized with a wide circle of people in the city didn’t understand that, and even upon the intern’s arrival they had nudged me: “Maybe you and Oliver will become friends. He’s only three years older than you.”

I didn’t have high hopes. He was aloof, overly confident, ran his hand through his hair but was nonchalant about how it fell after, and left from places with only a curt _Later!_ trailing after him like on his third day with us, when I tried to show him the garden in the back.

I had asked him about it at lunch, before he had had time to disappear into the museum building again.

“Yes, Elio?”

The way he said my name was different from anyone else’s and I hadn’t decided yet whether I liked it or not. I figured I would need to hear him say it a few more times.

I asked if he’d like to see my mother’s pride and joy, the orchard with the pear trees and cherries and apples.

“That sounds great.”

The sun was at its high point and the leaves provided scarce shade when I showed him the ordinary Bartletts, but also the Juliennes and the precocious Moonglows. They weren’t ready yet, but I tore one Moonglow off of the tree to show him.

“See? These produce fruit a year or so earlier than the others.”

He took the pear from my hand, his thumb brushing over mine by accident and I buried my hand in my pocket.

“Have you and your parents been here for many years?” he asked, just to ask something, because surely my father had told him our history with the place by now.

“Five years. My father’s friend tipped him off about this house and he hates the city in the summer, so here we are.”

“It’s nice out here. I like it. The peace and quiet.”

I took him through the rows of cherries and he went along with it, feigning interest either to be polite or because he didn’t know how to get out of this impromptu tour. The apples were in the last row and I needed to stand on my tiptoes to reach up to the branch. My shirt rode up.

“These are my favorites,” I said and instinctively tugged the hem of my t-shirt back down before he could see the large birthmark below my ribs. I had been teased about it as a child and had learned to keep it covered.

He didn’t say anything, so I turned to look and caught him looking at me instead of the pale, unripe apples.

“Here, on the tree,” I said, shaking the branch pointedly, hoping the birthmark hadn’t disgusted him and he looked at me funny, gave the pear back to me and said:

“Okay, thanks for the tour. Later!”

He left, with long strides in the rustling, overgrown grass. My mother had tried to get my father to mow it for days.

Was it me? Had I done something?

I watched him walk through the orchard, across the yard, and into the observatory and I wasn’t sure if I even liked him, but I didn’t like the thought that he might’ve been upset with me. Or worse yet, bored.

The weeks of July went by the same way as they had every summer, except whenever I climbed up the narrow, wooden stairs to the old observatory to pay a visit to my beloved telescope, I no longer got to do that in peace.

He was always there, dusting the glass display cases or sitting at the desk reading or writing, presumably both for his thesis.

My mother had brought him a table lamp to set off the darkness that flooded in from the big windows after sunset. The windows covered every wall of the circular room and as the building sat on top of a hill, the views always made me feel like I was on the top of the world. The observatory wasn’t a large space, but the presence of history and the smell of scholars—or dust, as my mother put it—enchanted me. Had the floors been any less squeaky or the desks any less scratched it wouldn’t have been the same.

The first few times I went up there that summer, he mostly left me alone, but then one evening he asked whether I knew if there were any erasers up there. I said I didn’t think so. Maybe in my father’s study downstairs, but not up here, no.

“You should have brought your own,” I said and thought whether it would be too much if I ran back to my room to get him one.

Then he asked if really no visitors came here, ever.

“Not really. A couple of times we get a retired couple who remember this place from when it was still in use. Or a young family who are driving around, trying to find quirky places to show their disinterested kids.”

“Why are the kids disinterested?”

“Because this is a strange place. No one gets it.”

“You seem to.”

I didn’t know what he meant.

“You come here every night,” he explained.

Did I? Well, on Monday I had thought it best to check if Oliver was really careful with everything, since he was alone up here all night, writing, and many of our museum pieces were fragile and priceless.

On Tuesday, I had come after dark to take a quick look at Polaris on the telescope. And Oliver had asked what I was doing, and we had gotten into a conversation about Venus, too, so then I had come on Wednesday morning to show him the morning star. And the day after, I had come just because I hadn’t felt like reading or practicing but had still wanted to do something before bed.

I shrugged. So what if I came here often? I had no interest in admitting he was right.

“Are you looking at the North Star again tonight?”

“Polaris,” I corrected him.

“Yes, the North Star.”

“It’s only the North Star right now. Kochab was the North Star two thousand years ago. And in another two thousand years from now, it will be Errai. Twelve-thousand years from now, Vega. It has to do with the precession of the equinoxes,” I added when he started to look puzzled.

“How do you know all this?”

“Astronomy professor for a father.”

He turned to his desk again and left me be.

I set up the telescope with care as always, starting with a low-power eyepiece, adding a higher magnification one and finally a Barlow lens after the finder had settled on the bright glint of Polaris.

Always there, never burning out.

For a seventeen-year-old, the world and self were in eternal flux, so knowing something was constant, safely looking down on me from the sky every night, was something to hold on to. Finding the light amidst the darkness calmed me and helped with the creeping restlessness.

After I had taken my time with my old friend, I took a look at Oliver. I watched his back for a while, broad and hunched over his papers, the hair at the nape of his neck already growing out of its neat straight line. My mother might offer to cut it for him at some point.

He was entrenched in his writing and I didn’t want to bother him so I said, only in passing: “Do you want to see, too?”

He put down his pencil, came over and I moved to the side, letting him sit by the telescope.

“Yes, there it is,” he said looking through the eyepiece and smiled.

I had only gotten him to smile a couple of times. He had an inscrutable face with me, he saved all his smiles for my parents. He smiled at my mother a lot, thankful for her cooking and this morning, for her offer to do his laundry.

“Thank you, Mrs. Perlman, but I’ve lived at the dorms for three years now, so I have learned to do my own laundry. Unlike Elio here, I’m sure,” he had nudged me.

It was clearly an insult masked as a joke, wasn’t it? I should’ve been offended at his suggestion that even at seventeen, almost eighteen, I was still an incapable child, not aware of the ways of the world or of the simple act of washing one’s clothes. I should’ve been outraged.

Instead, the part of my arm where his had touched, had felt like white fire and I had said nothing.

In addition to the museum space upstairs, I occasionally wandered into my father’s study, too, on the first floor of the observatory building. The first time I did it, my father acted like it was the biggest surprise of his life.

Arms spread, he welcomed me: “Elio! My stranger of a son, come in!”

“Why are you being like that?” I rolled my eyes, and took out a book from his shelf, opened it to a random page.

“Because you never come here! Oh, please, sit down! What made you decide to grace us with your company today?”

His theatricality made Oliver lift his gaze from the stack of articles he was cataloging across the room, and I instantly regretted coming in.

“I come here all the time,” I muttered and said nothing about the fact that Oliver hadn’t been upstairs when I had checked.

I sat down, continued to leaf through the book I had picked out, seeing none of the words but instead, Oliver’s legs in the corner of my vision, bare because of the annoyingly short shorts he insisted on wearing day in, day out, much more hair on his long shins than on mine. I was able to take it for about ten minutes and left.

The next day, my father said nothing when I came in again, only pulled out a chair for me, but Oliver looked up, his face lighting up with a tenth of a smile that he was too slow to hide. That smile kept me there for an hour and a half, if only to annoy him.

Two days later, my father was not there.

“Oh, it’s just you,” Oliver said, exasperated, when he looked up from the pile of papers.

He might as well have hurled a bucket of ice at me.

“I can go.” I started to leave but he apologized.

“Sorry, no, I just thought you were your father.” He sighed. “I’m afraid I need his help, I can’t get these papers to behave. I don’t know where he wants me to file these. These don’t match any of the categories we have.”

“Can I?” I suggested, tentative.

“Be my guest.” He handed me the article and raised his palms, gave up.

I took a look at my father’s scribblings at the top of the page. “See, this is from _Proceedings in Astronomy_. It belongs there,” I pointed at the binder marked with the title of the journal.

“I thought it was _Progress in Astronomy_. And there’s no category for that.”

“His handwriting isn’t the clearest,” I concurred. “I should know.”

“What do you mean?”

“One time I got out of gym for the entire semester when the teacher misread my father’s note.”

Oliver grinned. “You definitely haven’t used that to your advantage, right?”

“I had him write all the notes to my teachers from then on.”

“You don’t like gym?”

“I like jogging. I like riding my bike. I don’t like being forced to play in a team, or to have basketballs hit my face.”

“I prefer tennis. And jogging. I go for a run every morning.”

That explained why he was never in his room when I woke up. Not that I had checked, of course.

His next question shocked me.

“Would you like to go for a jog together some time?”

“Me?”

He tilted his head like one of us was taking the other for an idiot. “Yes, you,” he mocked me.

“I guess. Sure.”

I wasn’t really used to running with anyone else, but how bad could it be? Besides, he was probably just asking to be polite. He didn’t really intend to follow up on his offer. Or request. I wasn’t sure which one it was.

“Great. Tomorrow at seven?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and I hope you’re all doing well. 
> 
> More will follow next Thursday. I’ve been writing this story for the past seven months in fits and starts, but now that the draft is pretty much complete, I hope to be able to post new chapters weekly.
> 
> I always love hearing what you think, either here or on Tumblr: [angel-in-new-york-city](http://angel-in-new-york-city.tumblr.com)


	2. The Shirt

So then we jogged together on most mornings.

The route was always the same, out the door and past the observatory, down the hill and along the side of the road, until we could veer off to the path that led to the woods. The path meandered between willows and alders and circled a small, balloon-shaped pond. There was a large rock at the south end, and an opening in the woods a little after that where we could see the neighboring fields; we sometimes took a break at either of those spots.

We ran mostly in quiet, but sometimes he told me how he used to train with his older brothers when they were kids and his mother would make them sandwiches after. He never mentioned his father and I didn’t want to pry.

“Have you ever wanted siblings?” he asked and then corrected himself. “Ah, probably not. I forgot about the not liking to play in a team thing.”

The truth was, I used to want a brother when I was little. I told him that. “To have someone who would like me. Understand me.”

“I’m sure your parents like you.”

“It’s not the same. But there was a pair of twins in my class in middle school and they were nothing like each other. Fought all the time. So I abandoned my plan.”

“Sometimes your family can be nothing like you.”

I wasn’t sure if he was being sympathetic or saying it about himself, instead. Before I could figure out which one it was, we’d come to the end of the run and I stopped to look at him, maybe really look at him for the first time and his cheeks, flushed with the run, made me think I might like him as a brother. Even if we were nothing like each other.

After that realization my restlessness about him started to settle. It was clear that my wanting to seek him out was nothing more than me trying out what it would’ve been like to have an older brother, someone to go to to talk about my day.

He also got into a habit of teasing me like a brother would, and I liked it and I tried to impress him like the youngest of a family would. He had taken Astronomy 101 at his university, but my lifetime of sitting at my father’s lectures disguised as dinners had taught me more than that one class of his had managed to do. So I tried to appear nonchalant, like everyone had to know that Hipparchus’ view of the sky was the oldest surviving depiction of Western constellations, but when he looked at me and said, once again, how he couldn’t fathom how a boy like me could know such things, it was hard to contain the joy that tingled inside me.

The joy was pure, almost child-like pride of the praise, until one morning, already changed after our jog myself, I walked into his room to ask if he was ready for breakfast.

He had just come from the shower and inexplicably left his door open so I caught him pulling up his shorts, but they weren’t all the way up yet and I got a glimpse of his naked hip—one could’ve said it was bare, but ‘naked’ felt like a more apt description—and the hair on his chest was wet and continued all the way down to the place where his fingers were now zipping up the shorts. My eyes moved up to his chest that was just as broad as his shoulders were, the shoulders I had looked at when he worked at his desk or jogged in front of me, and his skin was still glistening from the shower and that was when he looked up.

“Elio?”

He seemed unfazed but my cheeks flared hot, so I mumbled something about breakfast and fled.

He turned up in the kitchen fully clothed a few minutes later, but his wet hair stood as a reminder of the moment when I hadn’t suddenly known myself anymore. I thought about leaving the table, saying I didn’t feel well, but I had no interest in answering the inevitable battery of questions or my mother taking my temperature, so I stayed and ate a single piece of toast while the others worked their way through a full breakfast.

I stayed out of the observatory building for the rest of the day.

Instead, I took my book and went to sit under the pear trees, knowing my parents would thus think everything was normal and would leave me alone. But I didn’t read, and instead, picked up a fallen pear from the ground. A Moonglow, of the precocious variety. Ripening before it knew to expect it. I bit into it and the flesh was juicy; maybe they were ready for harvest soon.

It wasn’t that I’d never felt that way before. But it had always been fleeting and at a safe distance, never with someone I knew, actually knew, and definitely not with someone who slept in the room across from mine.

In the evening, I saw the light come on in the observatory. I saw Oliver’s shadow as he went around the room, taking care of the museum cases first and then settling at his desk to work on his thesis. I had an urge to go there, just to watch him and see if the feeling would pass, but instead, I slipped into my old room.

Oliver’s clothes were strewn about the room, not on the floor like mine always were, but draped over the back of the chair, bedspread, and the stool by the door. I recognized the shirt he had worn that morning on our jog; it hadn’t gone to the wash yet. I picked it up, turned it around in my hands.

“Elio!”

I froze. It was my mother, calling for me from downstairs. Was she coming up? I bunched up the shirt, tucked it under my arm and snuck back to my room.

Once there, I yelled back: “Yes?”

“There’s that movie you like on the tv! Do you want to come down?”

I heard my father’s voice add something.

“Yes, _Red River_!” she called again. “The one with the orphan boy and the cattle ranch!”

“I’m already going to bed!”

“Okay, good night, darling!”

I closed my door and in order to avoid having completely lied to my mother, took off my clothes and really slipped under the covers.

I had nothing on but I had taken Oliver’s shirt to the bed with me. It was dry but still smelled of him, faintly of a cologne he used on some days and some days he didn’t—I hadn’t figured out the pattern of that yet—but mostly it smelled of sweat. By all accounts, it should have been repulsive, but I pressed the shirt on my face and inhaled. I thought about what I’d seen and how this fabric had touched all of it, the curve of the upper arm and the firm of the muscle, the plane of his flat stomach. It had soaked up what had come from inside him, from his pores and I rubbed it against me, hoping some of it would come off on me.

I turned the shirt inside out and pushed it down along my body; remnants of his skin touching my naked torso, laying across my stomach, brushing at the hips and then lower.

At the height of it, I imagined if he’d ever find out what I’d done, if I’d brazenly tell him, if he’d find it disgusting or arousing.

After I was done, I stayed in my bed with the shirt, but if I had wanted to, I could have stretched my neck and seen Oliver’s silhouette working in the observatory. The thought made my stomach giddy.

He’d be around the next day.

Maybe only flashes, silhouettes, arms, but still him. He wouldn’t disappear into a subway entrance like that young man with the scruff on his face and sweat running down his back after a run. Or into the sea of people like that boy at Coney Island, who had smiled at me after I had looked at him for a moment too long.

If Oliver noticed the shirt missing the next day, he didn’t say anything. I had planned to take it back to his room when he’d gone to continue the filing and categorizing, but my father said he had a conference call and needed the office to himself undisturbed, so he dismissed Oliver for the morning.

“Are you sure, Pro Perlman?”

“Yes, yes. This internship shouldn’t be all about work for you, anyway. Go and see the town. Take Elio with you if you don’t know the way.”

“Thank you, that sounds great. Would you be free to come with me, Elio?”

We hadn’t spoken since the moment I had seen him shirtless the morning before, gleaming waterdrops stretching down his chest. Now he wanted me to go with him to town, just us?

“Surely he’s free,” my father chimed in. “You don’t have anything else to do, do you?”

I shook my head as a response and took a big mouthful of my juice so that no one could expect me to talk.

We left on our bikes, the sun still gentle, and Oliver had lied because he didn’t need me to show him the way. He rode ahead and was the one to finally break the silence.

“No Polaris last night?”

“What?”

“You didn’t come to the observatory.”

The wheat fields swayed in the low breeze. “I needed to practice.”

“Why is it that I haven’t heard you play yet, by the way? Your father always talks about what a prodigy you are, going to Juilliard in the fall, but even you prodigies should practice every once in a while, right?”

I had gotten into the habit of practicing in the afternoons when he and my father were away at the office. I told him this but left out the reason.

“Afternoons? Maybe you could make an exception sometime?”

“Maybe.”

I knew there wasn’t going to be an exception.

One evening my father had specifically prodded me about playing for the three of them after dinner, but I had refused. I hated coming off surly but playing wasn’t an option.

Not because I would’ve been nervous, but because it was the only way for me to express my feelings. Instead of talking to a friend, I had grown to put every thought and emotion into the notes, the scores, the pieces. And doing that, releasing all of my secrets into the air where anyone could catch them, hadn’t sounded like the best idea as long as Oliver was around.

That evening, after I had refused, my father had said he’d have to find another way to create music, then. He had put on a Sinatra record and broken out a bottle of dark rum, pouring a splash for Oliver and me, too.

“Have a taste of the center of the universe, boys,” he’d said as he’d handed us our glasses. “Smells like rum and tastes like raspberries.”

Oliver had looked confused, so I had explained. It was one of my father’s favorite anecdotes; I had heard it dozens of times.

“The same compound that gives rum its smell and raspberries their taste, has been found in the dust cloud in the center of the galaxy.”

“Yes, ethyl formate,” my father had added, smiling, and asked my mother to dance when the record player began to fill the room with _Moon River_.

They had danced in our living room, swaying in the darkening summer night. Oliver had watched them, the tumbler of rum in his hand, and I had watched Oliver.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mr Perlman’s anecdote came from [this Guardian article](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/apr/21/space-raspberries-amino-acids-astrobiology) based on [this Astronomy & Astrophysics paper](https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2009/19/aa11550-08.pdf). Technically, he wouldn’t have known about this 2009 discovery in 1983, but you know, fiction fiction fiction.


	3. The Ice Cream

In town, we ran a few errands that my mother had asked for and Oliver wanted to go to the bookshop.

They had a small astronomy section, a relic from the times when the observatory had still been in use and people had actually come to the area on purpose. The books were from the same era, dust jackets dusty and the edges of the pages yellowed from the sunlight.

Oliver browsed through the limited selection, picked out one about pole stars and before paying for it, asked for my approval.

“Would this be a good one, Elio?”

There it was again, my name. By now, I had figured out that I not only liked, but lived for the way he said it.

I shrugged and nodded and hung back, thumbing the backs of the books on the shelves as he took his book to the cashier.

“Why did you get that?” I asked him outside as he was tying the book to the back of his bike.

“To learn new things,” he said and started off with his bike. He pointed across the street. “Can we go there?”

I followed him as he pedalled to the general store in the corner and he told me to wait outside. He came out with a pack of cigarettes and lighted one. I hated the smell but found myself being enthralled by the way he held his. He looked like the rugged cowboys in movies.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

He gave a non-committal shrug.

“Why don’t you smoke at the house?” I asked.

“I don’t do it all the time. Just when my nerves need it.”

“Do your nerves need it now?” I hated to think that he was so annoyed by having to spend the morning with me.

“No,” he laughed. “It just felt like a good time. Do you want one?”

I shook my head and instantly regretted it. I might have gotten him to put it between my lips, lean close to light it with his lighter. But I had never smoked before, so my inevitable coughing would’ve given me away and that would’ve been even more embarrassing than whatever was happening to me as I watched him take another drag through the filter.

I twirled a few steps to look at the store window, to hide both the need to adjust myself and the blush that was heating up my cheeks.

The shop girl was refurbishing the display on the other side of the window, crouching on the sill to arrange the packs of hosiery and single-use rain ponchos in neat stacks. It was a hot summer and neither were in high demand.

She waved at me. We shopped there often and my mother liked her, so I smiled back but returned to Oliver.

“I think she likes you,” he whispered conspiratorially.

“Nah.”

He nudged me with an elbow. “I bet she thinks you’re cute.”

I shook my head. “No one thinks I’m cute.”

I wasn’t being coy or a martyr; I considered it a fact.

“Surely that’s not true.”

I dragged my foot along the edge of the sidewalk. The bottom of my sneaker made a scratching noise. “It’s fine. My aunt once told me that not everyone has to be good-looking.”

She had meant to be comforting, to calm the waters after my cousins had called me spindly and ugly in the heat of an argument.

“You’re a lot of things, Elio. I hope you know that.” The smoke plumed out from the corner of Oliver’s mouth and he looked like he was about to say something more, but stubbed out his cigarette instead and squeezed my shoulder. “Okay, should we get ice cream before we go back?”

He paid. He let me choose my cone and paid for it. I chose Chocolate Crisp and he bought a Strawberry Dream for himself, and watching him eat it let me see more of his tongue than all the other times put together. I had to look away, for the ice cream started to melt down my fingers.

For a moment I imagined if this was how dating was; someone buying you ice cream and wanting to sit next to you on one of the three red benches of the town square while you eat it. If this had been a date, he might have tried to hold my hand, or since we were in public, maybe just occasionally brush his foot against mine. Or casually press closer so that our thighs would touch.

Oliver did none of those things but he let a glob of his Strawberry Dream slide from his lip down to his chin where it stayed. I tried to tell him where it was—“ _no, a little to the left_ ”—and thought that if this was a date, I could have reached over with my thumb to wipe it off. He would’ve stilled and let me rub at it.

Finally he found the spot.

“Yes, right there.”

“Thanks,” he said and slid the tip of his tongue over his lips once more.

I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. To kiss anyone.

No, not anyone. Him. To have him slide over my lips with that same tongue.

We biked back without exchanging a word, until he challenged me to a race at the bottom of the last hill.

I was happy to agree. Our day in town had seeped into my limbs as aimless energy and it felt good to make use of it as we climbed with our bikes, in unison, towards the observatory standing high up on the hill.

My mother looked at us when we arrived at the house, panting and puffing. “What on earth has you boys so out of breath?”

“We had a race,” Oliver hummed amused, left his bike by the wall and disappeared inside.

I wanted to follow him inside and everywhere, but he could apparently only stand my company for half a day, so I didn’t. Instead, I went to my room and waited for him to leave for the observatory before I returned his shirt.

In the evening, I stood at my window watching the light that had come on in the observatory and debated with myself. In the end, I took the bait.

Oliver was hunched over his desk as usual, but he wasn’t writing; he was reading the book he had bought in town earlier that day.

I had barely set my foot inside when he asked: “You know how long it will take for Polaris to be the North Star again?”

I tried to remember. “About twenty-thousand years, maybe?”

“25,772 years.”

He enunciated each digit clearly, and seemed so pleased with himself that I had to ask: “Did you buy that book just so you could outdo me on something?”

“Maybe.”

“Ha.” I smiled at him and he smiled back.

I bent over the telescope, removed the eyepiece cover and started aligning the finder.

Usually he fired off his comments from his desk, but now he came over, stood right behind me because I could feel the edge of his shirt brush against my back, and I forgot to tighten the thumbscrews before adding the Barlow lens and thus the alignment was off again. I had to re-focus.

Finally he asked: “See anything?”

His voice was right by my ear. I cleared my throat and nodded vigorously, forgetting that I had my eye in the eyepiece and ended up scraping the corner of my eye on the edge.

“Ow!” I slammed my palm against my eye.

“Sorry, did I startle you?”

“No, it’s just—me being stupid.” I could feel that it was just a scrape and the sting was already subsiding. The only thing scuffed was my pride.

“You’re the least stupid person I know.”

Between our rivalry and games, he’d rarely complimented me but was he doing so now?

I didn’t have time to ponder on that because he asked: “Can I look?”

I moved to the side but only by one step, testing how it would feel to keep being this close to him.

He was wearing his cologne again, which he hadn’t been that morning, but his proximity was making me lose my train of thought and I couldn’t pick out any notes of it so I could try and recreate it later when I’d get back to the city. I had a plan already. I would go to one of the tiny perfumeries in the Village or Chelsea, one I would never visit after that, and sample their entire selection so that I could find one that smelled like him. I wouldn’t use it, I would keep it in my drawer for days when I wanted to remember him.

Or if I was honest, nights when I wanted to remember him.

Even before the night I slept with nothing but his shirt, I had had him in bed with me.

It had started already after the very first time he had touched me; after I had given him the pear. At first when I had started doing it, I had deliberately pushed away any thoughts of him during it. But every time, shortly before I came, his face had always slipped in and over time I’d started suspecting that there was a connection between my orgasm and the memory of the feel of his thumb sweeping over my skin. One night I tested out my theory by thinking of his post-run, flushed face as I wrapped my hand around myself, and I didn’t last more than a few minutes.

So now that his face was inches from me, peering into the night sky through the telescope, I didn’t have many doubts left that while my mind was stubborn and desperate in its wishes to think of Oliver as a brother, my body wanted something else from him.

There was no possible way I could let him know that, of course, because he would’ve laughed at me, teased me, and I would’ve either died of embarrassment or fallen for him even more hopelessly. Neither of those scenarios sounded appealing, so I was going to keep my mouth shut.

Still, knowing he would only need to turn his head a little and his lips would brush against my cheek was exhilarating to think about and so I didn’t move.

“Can you see it? Polaris?” I asked, and unlike me earlier, he stayed very still when he answered.

“Yes, there it is, every night right there.”

He shuffled to get up and I needed to move so that his lips didn’t, in fact, brush against my face, even though for a second I wondered what would’ve been so awful about it they, indeed, had.

He looked down at me because he was tall, and that was another thing I liked about him, and he looked and said: “I’m glad you came tonight. It wasn’t the same here last night.”

I didn’t know if I was supposed to say something, or do something, or let him do something, but I couldn’t have him look at me like that, like he had just looked at the universe and its million stars but he’d rather look at me, so I deflected, escaped and started removing the eyepieces to pack them up. He sat down to watch me, not at his desk but at the edge of a display case.

“You can’t sit there,” I told him without looking. “The glass may break.”

He got up, stuffed his hands in his pockets but didn’t stop looking. I’d done the same pack-up of the telescope lenses hundreds of times before, but my brain got foggy and for the first time I had trouble remembering in which direction the thumbscrews loosened.

“Got it now?” he asked, amused by my fumbling.

“Yes, and I know how to do this, it’s all your fault,” I muttered mostly to myself, but he heard and I had probably wanted him to hear, but then didn’t know how to answer when he asked:

“What do you mean it’s my fault?”

I said the only thing that came to my mind. “You make me nervous.”

He was about to take a step towards me, but we heard commotion from the stairs and it was my father, calling us for dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so grateful for the lovely comments you've left, thank you <3


	4. The City

Oliver left the dinner table first, saying the trip to town must have tired him out and when I went upstairs, his door was closed. We didn’t go for a jog the next morning, and so we hadn’t had a chance to continue our interrupted conversation before we met for breakfast.

He and I already sat around the kitchen table scarfing down my mother’s pancakes, when my father arrived, excited and buttoning up the sleeves of his shirt. It was a dress shirt and he never wore those here in the countryside.

“Boys, would you be interested in a road trip?” he asked and kissed my mother on the cheek as she poured him a cup of coffee and stacked his plate with pancakes.

It turned out my father needed to go to the city for a meeting with the department head.

“But it isn’t until in the afternoon, so if we leave right after breakfast, we will be able to squeeze in some educational time at the Hayden.”

“Are you sure it’s wise to take the boys?” my mother worried. “There will be heavy rain later, and you know how it always gets in the city, streets flooding everywhere.”

“I’m sure the boys can handle it,” my father tempered her. “Elio can surely hold his own against a Manhattan rain shower by now. And Oliver isn’t scared of water either, now, are you?”

Despite living on the East Coast for his whole life, Oliver had only been to New York City once, and that had been when he’d been a child.

“Elio can show you around,” my father offered as he drove. Oliver had been given the front seat. “I’m sure you two will find something to do for an hour or two while I’m at the meeting.”

“Yes, dad,” I answered automatically, watching as the trees and hills rushed by and the rural scenery slowly turned into a man-made one.

As turnpikes and traffic jams started to appear, and eventually skyscrapers and millions of people, I wondered how the trip would go, especially the time that my father would be gone. How could I possibly hold Oliver’s interest in the busy city? I liked the way he’d grown to look at me over the weeks; as if at last, what I did and said was interesting to someone, but faced with the never-ending stimuli of Manhattan, would I be able to compete?

Our first stop was the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History.

My father knew the guards and stopped to say hello, also to a curator who was passing through the museum floor. They talked about a lecture my father was supposed to give later that year in their annual seminar series, and he introduced me and Oliver as his son and his ‘other son, on loan for the summer’.

It was off-season for the star shows in the auditorium, but after the curator went back to work, my father toured Oliver in the exhibition hall. I sat on one of the blue benches and watched them walk from case to case and plaque to plaque, my father enjoying his audience of one. Everything in the exhibit was new to Oliver, but I knew even from a distance what was in each case that they looked at and I realized that here, Oliver was on our territory, my territory. Back at the summer house I was also a visitor, only there for a couple of months a year, but this was home. And not just the city; I’d been here at the museum and the planetarium so many times that I’d lost count and even the tears in the leather benches, old and in bad need of renovation, were familiar to me in their imperfection.

I would have to try and hold Oliver’s interest for the next few hours while my father would be gone, but here in the city we would be on my grounds and I was starting to think I might be able to handle it.

After the planetarium, my father was off to Columbia for his meeting.

“Sorry boys, but I don’t think we have time to have lunch together,” he said apologetically and fished out a few bills from his wallet for me on the corner of 81st Street and Amsterdam Avenue. “But take these and find something to eat for yourselves, okay? Your mother will never let me hear the end of it if I bring you back starving.”

I took the money from him. ”That’s fine, we can grab hot dogs. I know where to get decent kosher ones,” I added to Oliver.

“Yes, very good. So, have fun, boys,” were my father’s last words before he turned around the corner and headed towards the university. “And I trust that you will keep to the decent neighborhoods, Elio? We want Oliver to like our city, not get robbed.”

The quiet of the countryside was no more. Amongst the blinking traffic lights, busy avenues, and crowded delis I showed Oliver some of my spots on the Upper West Side: my favorite bookstore, the best park for reading, the hot dog place.

I liked having this upper hand with him, for once. Despite him being our guest, it had often felt like he was holding all the cards while I was playing with an empty hand. Here, the city was foreign to him and he let me decide what we would be doing.

I also took him past Juilliard.

“This is where I’ll be going this fall,” I pointed at the building when we were at the bottom of the steps. “They held the auditions at the beginning of the year, so I’ve known it for a while. I did Bach in my audition, I thought it wouldn’t stand out because surely everyone applying for the piano program would do it, but it all still worked out.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Sorry, this is boring for you. I shouldn’t just show you things I like. Let’s do something else.” I started walking again and he had to take a few faster steps to keep up with me.

“No, I like it.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I like this. You, showing me your city. I still only wish you’d let me hear you play,” he added and bumped on my shoulder.

“Maybe one day,” I said and started feeling more confident that it might actually happen. One day.

We ventured into the park, bought raspberries from a cart for dessert and sat on a bench. A street performer was playing saxophone in the distance and neither of us said anything for a long time as we listened.

“I really appreciate your father bringing us here, not to mention taking us to the planetarium,” Oliver finally said as he put a handful of berries in his mouth all at once.

“He does a lot of things like that for his students. Not that you’re his student, but still.”

“I guess I kind of am. For the summer.”

I remembered for the first time in a long time that this wouldn’t last forever, this dance with Oliver. I had gotten so used to waking up and having him be somewhere in the perimeter of the house, even if I didn’t know whether the day would punish me by keeping him out of sight all day, or reward me with a brush on the arm, or, occasionally, a smile.

He swallowed yet another handful of berries. They had already colored his lips darker than usual. “It was so cool to see what those telescopes can do. The real good ones. No offense to yours.”

“None taken.”

He wiped his fingers on his shorts; they left red streaks behind. I wondered if he would keep insisting to wash them himself or would he let my mother do him a favor and do his laundry at least once before he left. I wondered if he’d let me do anything as a favor to him before he left. Anything that would’ve made me even a small factor in the trajectory of his life.

There were only four raspberries left in our carton. We divided them between us, two and two, and I remembered my father’s anecdote.

“Our mouths are the centers of the galaxy now,” I said, hoping it would make him think about my mouth and—then what? We were sat on a bench in the middle of the park, in broad daylight, so I don’t know what I thought it could’ve led to. Maybe it would’ve put the thought in his head, and he would’ve let my mouth do him a favor before he would leave for good?

Oliver stared at my lips for a while but then looked away and changed the subject.

I wanted to kick myself. I knew it; it had been too much. The city had made me cocky, it made me think I could go around pretending I could flirt with him and it had backfired. _I shouldn’t have said it, I shouldn’t have said it, I shouldn’t have said it._

He wanted to leave the park soon after. We had been blessed with the sunny weather longer than expected, but now the skies started closing in with dark, ashy clouds as my mother had predicted.

Oliver asked where we should go for cover but despite leading our walking tour earlier, I didn’t feel as certain about anything anymore.

“Let’s find something once we get out of the park,” I said and let him walk ahead.

The first drops appeared on our shoulders when we returned to the grid of the Manhattan streets, and then the rain started in earnest, feeling like someone was pouring buckets over us from the rooftops.

We began sprinting and in a rush, managed to duck under an archway and were joined by a similarly stranded young family and three office workers in suits. The space was cramped, and Oliver pressed lightly against me so that the others could fit in. I turned my head to the side, my cheek brushing against his chest and my back against the cold wall of the building.

The children of the family were getting anxious, having to stand still in close quarters and I noticed now that Oliver was wearing his cologne today. I wondered if it was on purpose. Did he want to appear worldly for the visit in the city? I had never smelled it this close before and tried to concentrate on dissecting its notes, instead of continuing to think about how clumsy my line about the raspberries had been.

In the end, it turned out to be just a shower. The others left, hurried, to continue their day the first moment the downpour let up, but we stayed and Oliver didn’t move.

I glanced up at him.

My heart pounded when he looked at me and he’d been saving his question for the past day and a half, specifically for this moment:

“So. I make you nervous?”

I couldn’t just run and leave now, leave him stranded in the city in a neighborhood he didn’t know. Surely he would venture down the wrong street and be robbed in no time and then what would my parents say?

I looked out onto the street; the pavement gleamed with shallow puddles. “Sometimes.”

“Like right now?” He sounded amused, which made me both mad and pleased in the pit of my stomach.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Why is that?”

“You know why.”

In the dark of the archway, his fingers touched mine, lightly, testing whether I would move them away. I curled mine fully into the warmth of his palm.

A man with a dachshund passed by the archway on the street, the dog wet and miserable from the rain that had caught them by surprise. Two women with scarves knotted under their chins, a businessman still carrying his umbrella, and us, standing there hidden from all of them, hand in hand. Eventually I lifted my face to look at Oliver and all we’d done was stall, that day and all summer.

I was tall for my age but he was taller, so he needed to lean down.

Distance to Polaris: 433 light years.

Distance to Oliver’s lips: close to zero, and he left the final decision to me.

When I reached up so that I could press my mouth on his, his lips were warm but chaste and closed, almost as if he needed me to work for it if I wanted more.

I pulled back and his eyes gave nothing away, so I placed my forefinger on his bottom lip and he let it relax, parted his lips so I could reach up again and then it was a proper kiss.

I opened my mouth wider when he pressed me against the wall and I let him really, really kiss me. His tongue made a visit, brief but intoxicating enough that I wanted to feel it again, and when he broke off the kiss, I panted: “Don’t stop.”

But because he was wiser than me, he had heard the steps, and he pulled away from me a moment before someone came from around the corner, and we left.


	5. The Casserole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This week’s update comes to you early because there will be server maintenance work on AO3 on Thursday which may lead to undelivered emails, and I didn’t want those of you who’ve subscribed to the notifications, to potentially miss the one about this chapter.

Everything rotates around the North Star; it’s bright and constant and isn’t forgotten even when everything else changes.

That’s how I felt about our kiss.

My father picked us up soon after we’d left the protection of the archway, and we didn’t talk about it before that and definitely not on our car ride home. The sky was yellow, the sun setting somewhere over New Jersey, and my father and Oliver were deep in discussion on the work they had ahead of them now. My father had procured three new boxes of articles to go over.

Their words barely registered with me and behind their chatter lived the memory of Oliver’s body up against mine, his lips on my mouth and his soft tongue stroking mine for that short moment that had changed my life.

It was all I thought about when we pulled into our driveway, or when we ate the brisket my mother had made, or when I climbed upstairs for bed.

Eventually the thought shifted and became: was it just for the city? Now that we were back home, were things back to how they had always been?

I kept looking out of my window and checking, but the upper floor of the observatory stayed dark.

That was Thursday, and on Friday, I barely saw him.

There was no jog, and he disappeared with my father into the office right after breakfast. They emerged for a quick lunch, but going through the new batch of papers was keeping them busy.

In the evening, the observatory continued to stay dark.

On Saturday morning, my mother said she’d leave a dinner casserole in the fridge.

“Are you not going to be here for dinner?” I asked.

“No, and neither will your father. We have been invited to the Goldsteins, and we’ll be back late. It’s a long drive, we need to leave in the afternoon already. Will you two be okay on your own? You only need to heat it up. There’s spinach and that cheese from Berger’s in it.”

I nodded. “Got it.”

“Do you know how to use the oven? I’m sure Oliver can help you.”

After the radio silence between us, I wasn’t so sure Oliver would ever want to have anything to do with me again. “No, I’ve got it.”

I watched my parents get into the car, and assured my mother we’d be able to feed ourselves when she rolled down the window one more time before the car turned around the bend and out of sight.

I was reading on my bed when he knocked on the door.

He sat at the foot of the bed after I’d told him to come in. I set my book aside. “I haven’t seen you much.”

He looked at me bravely and didn’t apologize for his absence. “I know.”

“Is it because of what happened in the city?”

“I shouldn’t have done anything.”

He was looking to atone, but I only wanted to sin more. I sat up. “It wasn’t just you.”

He searched for the words I had hidden between mine. “Yeah?”

I hugged my knees. I had been prepared for this but had to ask. “Is it over now?”

He studied the stitching on my bedspread, glanced at my feet planted next to him. He was about to place his hand on top of my foot when he stopped, looking for my permission and I nodded. His thumb petted the skin, and I moved to place my foot fully in his lap.

He looked up. “You like this?”

I hadn’t known that I did, but I realized that I liked it whenever he touched me, anywhere. There were invisible Oliver imprints on my body wherever he had touched me, on my thumb from when he took the pear from me, on my arm from when he teased me at breakfast, on my fingers from when he held my hand under the archway, on my lips. And I wanted more, I wanted his marks all over me.

My foot could hardly be seen anymore, for his large palms had covered it between them. His thumb pressed into my arch, but we both knew this wasn’t why he had come here, so I said: “You can kiss me again if you want.”

“Yeah?” Now his eyes gave everything away.

“Yeah.”

I lay down, and he stretched himself onto the bed next to me, supported himself on his side as his hand came to rest on my cheek. He hovered over me, and when he kissed me behind my ear, on the spot where the skin is paper-thin, a shiver went through me and eviscerated everything I had known. And this time it was his finger, not mine, that swept over my lips before he leaned down and when he did, he found my mouth already open for him like a hatchling of a lark, waiting to be fed.

We kissed for hours on my bed. I learned on the go and kissed his lips, the corner of his mouth, the birthmarks I discovered on his shoulder. He tasted the inside of my mouth and the skin on my throat, licked along the collarbone that he found when he stretched the neck of my t-shirt. At one point, his hand slipped under the hem and the feeling of his palm on my bare skin was a new one, but he only kept his hand there, safe in one place.

I was about to ask him to move it up, or down, anywhere as long as it was under my clothes, when the phone rang.

I kept on kissing him, but the rings were insistent and wouldn’t let up no matter how much I tried to will the sound away. I groaned and got up, leaving Oliver sprawled on the bed.

I picked up the phone in the hall. “Hello?”

“Elio?” It was my mother.

“Yes.”

“It’s mom. You sound breathless, is everything okay?”

I cleared my throat. “Yes, everything’s fine. Why are you calling?”

“Oh, darling, it looks like we have to stay here overnight. Miriam Goldstein says there’s a storm coming up and it’s not a good idea to drive back until in the morning, especially since your father has been drinking a bit. Have you eaten yet? Will you be okay?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I mean, no, we haven’t eaten yet. We will, soon. You don’t have to worry about us. We’ll be fine. See you tomorrow.”

Telling Oliver that our few hours of stolen time had stretched into an entire night was exhilarating. I climbed to straddle him on the bed, but he laughed and pushed me away.

“We need to do something else for a while or we’ll lose all reason and starve.”

We went down to the kitchen, where Oliver heated up the casserole while I set the table for two and tried to distract him as best I could with kisses on his neck and other places. He proved very good at holding one arm around me while holding a piping hot spinach casserole with the other.

Afterwards, we went up to the observatory and I let him take the first peek at Polaris.

“I want to sleep in your room,” I whispered in his ear as he sat looking through the eyepiece of the telescope.

“And where will I sleep?” he teased me.

“Very funny.”

He sat at my beloved telescope and I watched him, intoxicated by the fact that I got to share my universe with someone. With someone who wanted to kiss me and hold me. How had this happened? The weeks of guessing had quickly turned into a blur.

I must have said that out loud, because he left the North Star alone and pulled me to him, lifted my shirt, kissed my sides.

“You know, these are how I knew about myself. Whenever your shirt rode up, and I wanted to touch everything that I saw.”

I tousled his hair, slowly let it slide between my fingers as he pressed his face flush against my skin. “And when did you know about me?”

“Outside the bookstore. When you refused the cigarette but blushed.”

I blushed again at the memory.

After one more look at the night sky, I tucked the telescope in for the night and we ran back to the main house under the stars like puppies at play: chasing, fleeing, and finally catching.

I didn’t have a plan, but maybe I should have had one. All I knew was that I wanted to feel him and smell him and taste him as much as I could, and have him do the same for me. He pulled off his bedspread—my bedspread—and I slipped under the covers first before he followed me. The fabric of my shorts was thin, and I was certain he could feel everything when I pressed against him and he worked to take off my shirt. There was no question about what was happening between us as he moved to pull off his own, but I placed my hand on his to stop him.

He stopped immediately, placed his other hand on top of mine and said: “That’s okay. We don’t have to.”

He thought I didn’t want to, anymore, and I didn’t know how to tell him that that was not it, I just wanted to be undressed first, so I sat up on my knees to kiss him, already bare from the waist up, and guided his hand to my shorts.

“Take these off first.”

Eyes growing tender again, he kissed me once more before he pulled the shorts off along with my underwear.

I lay down, his eyes everywhere at once, and when he placed his hand on the inside of my thigh, I was so hard I could barely stand it. I didn’t know why I wanted him to see all of me when I hid from everyone else, but I did, and he also got to hear something no one else had heard when he gently wrapped his fingers around my cock.

He stroked me slowly—up, and down, and up, and down again—long enough to make me squirm with impatience, and then stopped me from touching myself while he took off all of his clothes. In one deft move, he lay down next to me with more bare skin than I had ever seen, and put his hand back on me and his lips on my mouth.

“Do you like this?” he whispered even though there was no need for us to be quiet.

My reply was yet another unintelligible sound. I closed my eyes and tried to think of other things in order to not come too fast, but the images always transformed into Oliver, hard, naked, in bed with me. My eyes flew open when I realized I should be doing this to him, too.

I fumbled between our bodies, found him hard against his hip. “Sorry, I know I should have—too—I just—no one’s ever done this for me.”

Oliver’s forehead smoothened into an amused face before he placed a sloppy, uncoordinated kiss next to my eye and left his nose pressed against my face. “It’s okay. You don’t have to.”

“No, I want to. I really want to.”

I’d held my own but never anyone else’s, and dizzily I thought that there should definitely have been a practice run instead of graduating straight to Oliver. I wished I could see better what I was doing, because I had dreamed of this, wondered, but Oliver’s hand was so much better at this that lying between him and the mattress, I could barely keep afloat.

Unsurprisingly, I came soon and first, but he wasn’t far behind. Out of inexperience, my grip loosened and my concentration waned the moment I started spurting and he had to finish himself off. He didn’t seem to mind and went to the bathroom after, to bring us both a wet towel.

“Here.”

That was another thing that had never happened before. I’d always been in charge of cleaning up after myself. Socks, tissues. Sheets. Trying to hide it all from my mother. I told him that and he laughed.

“Sounds like it keeps you busy.”

I told him the truth: a lot busier since he had arrived at the house _._ That made him kiss me so hard that my head sank deep into the pillows, and he was languid from the afterglow, but he said that otherwise he would’ve been hard again.

Oliver fell asleep first and it was weird to share my old bed with someone. His chest rose and fell and the steady sound of his breath filled the room. The longer side of his hair fell to the pillow above him.

I hadn’t fallen asleep with anyone next to me since I’d been a child. It seemed like a peculiar idea that when it was time to rest the body, human beings would go and find someone they liked and fall unconscious next to them. It was about trust, I had deduced. Finding someone one trusted not to hurt them whilst they were unable to defend themselves.

I curled my body around Oliver, and he stirred briefly, but didn’t move away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all your comments and for continuing to read. I was somewhat insecure about Chapter 4, not knowing how taking them out of the observatory setting would affect the overall tone at this point in the story, but it felt good to receive the messages that said that you had liked it nevertheless. (I do realize that the ending might have helped, too, though, haha.)


	6. The Moon Rock

We had had breakfast and Oliver was in the observatory, writing, when my parents’ car came up the hill and turned onto our driveway. We had woken up in his bed, taken turns at the shower, brushed our teeth and Oliver had made coffee while I’d made burnt toast.

My mother got out of the car, happy and rested, and rushed over.

“Hello, darling. Everything is okay here, yes?”

I nodded and knew that just like theirs, our brief vacation was over.

But then it wasn’t. That night, when the house was quiet and I was lying in bed thinking whether I should try to go and see if Oliver was still awake, and how I would manage that without my parents waking up downstairs, there was a soft voice at the door.

“Elio.”

I sprang up from my bed and pushed the door handle to the hilt before turning it, because that way it didn’t screech, and opened the door. Oliver came in.

I had quickly learned that I liked it most of all when we stood and he kissed me, leaned down so that when I looked up, all I saw was him. The room, the world—all him.

I pulled him to my bed, and he let me kiss him some more. We both took off our own clothes this time, almost in a race.

“I want to kiss you everywhere,” he whispered to my neck.

I told him he could, and he kissed my chest, my ribs, my navel and finally the tip of my cock. I grasped the sheets blindly, then reached for a handful of his hair when he took me deep in his mouth. He smiled around me when he let my length slide back out.

“You liked that?”

“Mm-hmm.”

I had no words left, all that escaped were whimpers and when they started to get too loud for the quiet house, Oliver threatened to stop what he was doing and kiss me on the mouth if that was what it took to keep me quiet. It wasn’t an entirely effective threat, but I concluded that right in that moment, I wanted his mouth right where it was and bit on my own arm to muffle my cries.

Oliver stayed with me through the night. He perused my room with his eyes in the scant light and reached over me to pick up a rock from my nightstand.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a moon rock.”

“A moon rock. Like Moonglow.”

“I didn’t think you were listening.”

“I’ve always listened to you.”

“I got it from one of my father’s friends when I was six. He told me it was the stone of invisibility, and I fell for it. Tried to use it at school but quickly—and bitterly—realized it didn’t work.”

Oliver turned the rough stone over in his hands. “I like it.”

“To be honest, I don’t think it’s even a moon rock. But I like it, too.”

“I can see why you were drawn to the invisibility factor.”

“I was so disappointed that it didn’t work.”

“Let’s try it,” he smiled and handed the rock to me. “Yeah, doesn’t work. I can see you completely.”

“I think you do,” I said, and it wasn’t part of the game anymore. “But no one else does.”

He took the rock from me, placed it back on the nightstand and gathered me in his arms. “Would you like them to?”

“Sometimes.”

“You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”

“No one sees that.”

“Maybe you don’t let them.”

“Maybe.”

“I hope you will, one day.”

It sounded weird to me in the moment, but a week later, when Oliver was packing to return to his university, I understood it better.

Our last week together was spent with the reality suspended, neither of us wanting to count the days before he would return to New Hampshire and I would stay behind for a few more days before our family, too, would pack up the remains of summer of 1983 and return to the city.

Parts of that last week were a fever dream, the nights when the temperature didn’t drop at all from the heat of the day and Oliver insisted on watching me in the moonlight. No one had ever looked at me like that and his mesmerized words about my body were hard to take seriously.

“When have I ever lied to you?” he asked, almost offended.

I tried to think of something. “When we rode to the town? You wouldn’t have needed me, you knew the way.”

He smiled. “Okay. That’s fair. But even that was so I could see more of these masterpieces.” He swept his thumb along my calf and our world was in that room.

He would kiss my knobby knees when we were in bed, and I tried to, but couldn’t, detect one false note when he claimed they were the best he’d ever seen. The large birthmark below my lowest rib, the one that I’d always tried to hide whenever I had to go to the pool, was somehow and inexplicably his favorite. I was used to covering it with my hand, it fell perfectly under my palm if I stood a certain way and put my hands on my hips, but he gently peeled my hand away and looked sincere when he traced the edges and called it the universe, naming the darker brown freckle in the middle the North Star. He even invented a game where I lay naked and he kissed nothing but the birthmark and we waited to see how soon I got hard. He usually cheated and let his chin brush up against my cock too, but we both pretended we didn’t notice.

On the other hand, I had a hard time believing that a body like his existed.

I reveled in how strong his thighs were, twice—or more—the size of mine. He knew that I liked him to lie on his stomach, naked, and I would cup my hand along the mathematically perfect, round curve of his buttocks over and over again. He should have known that when his arms, covered in golden hair, were around me I felt at home for the first time in my life. He must have known, must, all these things and yet he turned crimson when I kissed his ankles and told him that they were my favorite thing, gloriously carrying all of the rest of him like it was nothing.

On the eve of his departure, we sat in the observatory, but he didn’t pretend to do any reading for his thesis anymore. We sat by the telescope, away from the window so that my parents couldn’t see us when he held me or kissed me.

“Will you write me?” I asked him, nose buried in his neck.

“I will. But Elio, I do wish you would let other people in. Not just me.”

“Or maybe this was my summer as a mature cicada. And I now will go underground for the next seventeen years again.”

There were magicicadas in the area, broods that only emerged every 17 years like magic. I had told Oliver about them on one of the nights when he had marveled at the quietude. It was quiet now, but there had been incessant cicada song on our first summer here and after the first week, my mother had forced my father to call and cancel the deal of the house.

The owner had calmed her down, however, by telling her about the periodical nature of the creatures. We would get to have the land for the next 17 years while the next brood would peacefully mature underground, getting ready for their metamorphosis which they would, sadly, only get to enjoy for a few summery weeks.

“Maybe I was a nymph, emerging when you came, and now my six weeks of life as an adult cicada are over,” I mourned to Oliver’s ear and rather enjoyed the macabre metaphor.

Oliver didn’t. “Don’t say that. Your wings will hold if you try and spread them.”

It sounded like a goodbye.

“Do you promise?” He lifted my chin; made me look him in the eye.

I swallowed. I had known all along that the follies of summer, especially our kind of follies, didn’t last through the rough fall. First everything would fade to pale barley and then it would rain but it would be too late to revive anything from the summer. What was gone, was gone.

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t keep hiding from people, or behind that rock.” He shook me a little, in jest.

“I won’t become a cicada,” I muttered.

After, when he wasn’t looking, I went and hid the moon rock in his bag, under his clothes, as a sign that I would try to keep my promise. It was all I could give him.

We snuck into his room—our room—around midnight and I tried not to think of the night that would come after when I would sleep there, alone again. We enjoyed each other’s bodies for one last time, over and over again, and at some point of the night Oliver said, delirious and probably not really meaning it, that he could live forever with nothing but my mouth.

When we finally went to sleep, he arranged himself to hug me from behind, but I wanted to see him first thing if I woke up in the middle of the night.

“You’re crazy,” Oliver said fondly but pulled me close. We settled for sleeping face to face until I realized it wasn’t enough and burrowed my face onto his shoulder.

“Will you just hold me?”

The words got trapped into his skin that was already wet from my eyes, but he understood and arranged my body flush against his chest.

“I found it,” he said, throwing a duffel bag over his shoulder on the porch. “Thank you. I’ll take good care of it.”

“You weren’t supposed to find it until you were back home.”

“I’ll keep it on my nightstand.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

“If people ask, you can say you got it from the beach,” I offered him a way to cover his tracks.

“That’s a rather generic explanation.”

“Right. You don’t have to use it,” I said, embarrassed.

“That’s not what I meant. I meant, it means more than a—“

He touched my face, but then my father came, ready to take him to the train station.

My mother and I saw them drive off, and when the car turned around the final bend and out of the view, she turned to me and pulled me to her.

She rubbed my back, and my tears and snot ruined the shoulder of her silk blouse as she gently kept repeating: “Oh, darling.”

_A year later_

A little over a year later, fourteen months and five days to be exact, it was one of those Sunday mornings when one has nowhere to be. No plans with anyone, no engagements to keep in mind for later in the day. Manhattan had gone through an Indian summer earlier in the month but there were no traces of it left; instead, the fresh, cool air hinted at a winter approaching somewhere behind the horizon.

It was late October and I had just spent the Saturday evening out in the city with two of my classmates from Juilliard. Marzia, a petite Italian who’d taught me to look for change underneath the cafeteria vending machines was from the dance program, and Frederick, a clean-cut Upper East Sider who’d been the first one to talk to me on our first day, was a piano major like me. We had gone out to commemorate the end of the first exam week of our sophomore year, and my head was throbbing with the memory of how much fun we’d had, and how long it had lasted.

Only the search of good coffee could’ve gotten me to venture out of the residence hall that morning, and I walked a few blocks south to my usual place that opened early on Sundays. The fresh air felt good, the streets were relatively quiet, and I knew I could go in and get my coffee fast and be back at the dorms in no time. I would stay in for the rest of the day, or at least until life returned to my veins. The coffee might help with that, too.

However, when I was walking out of the cafe with my cup, someone stopped me at the door.

“Elio?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I continue to be so grateful for all of you who are reading this; whether you’re leaving kind comments or just showing up and reading in private. Thank you.
> 
> Up until now, the story has somewhat followed the plot points of the original but we go in a different direction from here, which means that despite the time jump, the second part won’t really be like Ghost Spots.
> 
> PS. The magicicadas are [real](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/science/marvels-and-a-few-mysteries-in-cicadas-17-years.html).


	7. The Note

“Elio?”

I felt a hand on my arm and turned around.

It was Oliver, tall and wearing a hoodie and sweatpants. _How weird to see him in so much clothing,_ was my first thought. _How good to see him_ , the second.

“I can’t believe it’s really you. What are you doing here?” he asked, even though by all accounts, it should’ve been me posing that question, instead. After all, the last time I had heard from him, via a letter sent well before New Year’s, I had been the one who lived in Manhattan and he had written to me from small town New Hampshire.

I said the first thing that came to my mind: “I’m on my way back to the residence hall.”

He let go of my arm.

“Residence hall?”

“At Juilliard.”

“Yes, of course,” he nodded and then: “Is it going well?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Good.” His eyes turned warm in a way that I hadn’t seen before. The previous summer, they had been elusive, tender, teasing or, towards the end, sad, but never warm like this. “Not that I ever doubted it. Even if you never once let me hear you play.”

He walked with me. He said he’d just moved to the city, was doing his doctoral studies at Columbia now, and I wondered if my father had seen him on campus. Seen him and decided not to tell me.

I sensed him watching me as we walked, but I didn’t want to, I couldn’t, glance back. He filled the silences that threatened to stretch too long while I didn’t know what to make of this, of his easy, only slightly shaky conversation as if ten months hadn’t gone by, letterless.

It hadn’t ended in a fight but in silence, which for some people might have been the same thing, but for us it wasn’t.

Nothing about the summer had ever been directly alluded to in the letters—I didn’t know if his roommates would see his mail and maybe he thought my parents might check mine—but the first and second and third letters had still sounded like my Oliver. After that, they had become decidedly perfunctory and eventually started to wane around Thanksgiving.

In my last one, as the last resort, I had told him that Juilliard had a three-week recess around New Year’s and maybe he’d like to visit the city then, but he’d replied that he had to use the break to study and ‘unfortunately wouldn’t be able to make it’.

When I hadn’t written him back and he had sent another letter, saying he’d always have fond memories of the summer and hoped that I would understand, I had known that that was that.

No promises of the future had been made, before his departure or after, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise. Had I ever thought I would hold the interest of someone like Oliver, when he had the whole world to choose from?

No.

I had imagined him, girls on his arm, putting our summer behind him.

And so with the memories of our hushed, warm nights exchanged for the December chill of Manhattan, I, too, had folded his letters and put our time together in a shoebox and closed the door.

A car screeched to a halt next to us at the traffic lights at 65th Street and Broadway, and I instinctively raised my hand to hold my temple.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No, I just have a little headache. We were out last night.”

“We?”

“Me and two of my classmates.”

“Oh. That’s nice,” he added.

“Frederick and Marzia. They both like Bach, too. And despise Wagner.”

“I see. A girlfriend?”

“Marzia?” I shook my head and smiled. She was pretty and kind, but I wasn’t interested in her like that. “No.”

I could tell he was debating asking the same about Frederick, so I added: “I’m not seeing anyone. Too busy with my studies. Besides, you know. Not very good with new people.”

“But you seem to have made friends with those two, right? Frederick and Marzia?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad,” he said and when I finally looked up at him, he looked like he really was. Glad.

We stopped as we got to the Juilliard residence hall.

“This is me,” I gestured.

He smiled. “Right. Maybe I’ll see you around?”

I kept thinking about his letter, how he ‘unfortunately wouldn’t be able to make it’, and wondered if this, now, was something one says just because it’s easier than the alternative.

I responded in the same tone: “Yes, maybe.”

Neither of us made any effort to move; I held my coffee and he stood with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his sweatpants, looking at me as if he was seeing me for the first time or memorizing me for the last.

“It’s really good to see you, Elio,” he added and touched my arm briefly before tucking his hand back in his pocket.

His intent gaze made me blush despite all my efforts not to and in a flash decision, I hugged him. In part because I needed to hide my blush, and in part because I wanted to.

“You too,” I said into the softness of his hoodie.

His hands came out of his pockets for good and he held me for a moment before stepping back and turning around the corner of the building, disappearing out of the view like he once had.

That chance meeting and the hug led to nothing.

Three whole days of nothing until I came home from classes on the fourth, and there was a note slip in my mailbox in the hall.

_There’s a new documentary on Jupiter’s rings showing at the Hayden and I need to see it for my classes. Would you like to go? I’m going on Saturday at three. Oliver._

There it was again, after ten months. His longhand with the stretched droops on the y’s and the g’s.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the note. What did he want from me after all this time?

And classes? Was he taking astronomy classes now? Did he want me there for my knowledge, to explain things that he didn’t want to ask from strangers?

Maybe.

He didn’t leave his address or a phone number, so my only options were to show up or not to show up. I let myself consider them both for three seconds, but I, and probably he, too, knew that there was never going to be anything other than one outcome. Letters or no letters, if he existed somewhere in my city, I wouldn’t be able to stay away.

By the time I got to the entrance of the museum the next Saturday afternoon, Oliver already stood by the pillar, breaking into a smile when he saw me in the crowd.

“I’m glad you came.”

He laughed and admitted that he’d already bought two tickets and I could’ve sworn he was nervous. Half of me was irritated by his having been so confident about my showing up; the other half liked that he knew me that well. Between those halves there was a sliver of silvery, undefined hope that I tried to tuck inside until I would figure out what it was that he wanted from me, if anything. Maybe this was just what he had claimed it was, an outing to see a documentary.

Maybe.

“Why wouldn’t I have?” I asked, sincere.

“You never wrote me back. I assumed you were mad at me.”

“I wasn’t.”

“No? You could’ve been. You should’ve been.”

“I just thought you didn’t want to have anything to do with me anymore.”

We were in public, so again, his touch on my arm was brief. “Elio.”

Then the line started moving and pushed us into the museum with the crowd.

Inside, we were about to enter the auditorium, when a clear voice chimed behind me in the hallway.

“Elio, is it you? Elio?” the voice asked again, now closer, and it was Marzia, eyes wide with the surprise of seeing me there.

“Hi, Marzia.”

She looked at me, then at Oliver, then at me again.

“Hello,” Oliver said.

“Hi, I’m Marzia.” She held out her hand and tilted her head the way she did when she was flirting with the RA of my building.

“Oliver.” He smiled, confident.

She linked her arm with mine but kept staring at Oliver. Asked what we were doing at the museum and if we had been to the polar expedition section yet. Her brother was visiting, and she had taken him to the museum but had lost him somewhere around the rare rock exhibition.

“So if you see a thirteen-year-old Italian kid, nose squeezed against the topaz cases, let me know.”

Oliver was good at this, smiling back and laughing at her jokes, but I grew restless and explained how we had really come here only for a quick visit to see the documentary on Jupiter.

“In fact, we were just going to go into the auditorium,” I said.

Oliver touched my wrist. “Why don’t I go ahead and get us good seats. You can come when you’re ready. It was nice to meet you, Marzia.”

Marzia glanced at my hand where Oliver’s fingers had touched, then watched as Oliver left and narrowed her eyes, contemplative. Finally, she turned to me when he was out of earshot.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“No one. Oliver.”

Her keen eyes, earlier fixed on Oliver, were now inspecting me.

“Marzia. Stop looking at me like that.”

“I remember telling you I understood, but I don’t think I did, after all.”

“Understood what?”

“When we tried to kiss.”

It had happened a year ago on our first fall semester, at the first party at my dorm. Normally I might have skipped it, but to keep my promise to Oliver, I had tried to participate more. It hadn’t been easy, and I had invited Marzia along to have at least someone to talk to, because Frederick had had to go to a family dinner.

Ever since she had sat next to me at the general orientation, Marzia had latched onto my company. She was pretty and flirty and I hadn’t been sure if I’d read any of the signs correctly, but if I had, I figured there might come a time when I’d have to tell her that I wasn’t interested in her in the same way.

At the party, there had been punch and beer and she had drunk far too much for a freshman and after she had thrown up once, she had asked me to take her to my room before she embarrassed herself any further. We’d been lying on the floor to keep her from feeling queasy, and in her vulnerable state of truth, she’d told me she’d wanted to kiss me since we met.

I might’ve done it more for me than for her, to find out about myself once and for all, but either way, I did it.

It felt weird. Or rather, it didn’t feel like—anything.

She had noticed and I had had to convince her that it wasn’t because of the throwing up thing. It had been nice, and she had been nice, but there was nothing more to it, for me. She’d said it was okay and that she understood.

“I wanted to seem cool about it, but I didn’t really get it until now. So, who is he?” she asked as people kept passing us by on their way to the auditorium.

“He used to intern for my father.”

She gestured at my slacks. “I’ve never seen you wear anything other than jeans.”

”It’s not like that. He needed company for the documentary they’re showing in the auditorium. We’re just hanging out.”

Hanging out in the way two people who once shared a sweat-soaked bed for two weeks hang out, but Marzia didn’t need to know that.

“If you say so. But based on the way he looks at you, I don’t think Oliver knows that.” She glanced at the time. “Look, I think you’re about to miss the show if you don’t go now and besides, I need to go and find my brother. But I hope to meet Oliver properly next time.”

“There won’t be a next time. He just wanted me to come and see the documentary with him.”

“Oh, trust me, there’ll be a next time,” she said, kissed me on the cheek and left.


	8. The Cologne

Oliver had found us seats in the back of the auditorium, in the middle of the row so that I—or he—couldn’t run away.

“Marzia seemed nice,” he said after I had sat down. “I liked her.”

“I noticed,” I said and scratched at the scrape on the armrest between us.

Oliver watched me and leaned in so that the people next to us wouldn’t hear. “Were you jealous?”

“No, of course not,” I denied.

“Of her, or of me?”

“I said I wasn’t jealous,” I repeated.

“If you say so.” He changed the subject and showed me the leaflet about the day’s documentary. “Have you seen this before?”

“Not yet. My father’s been busy. We usually go together whenever there’s a new one.”

“Too bad we didn’t have time to see one when he took us here,” Oliver said, toning his voice down to a whisper as they started to dim the house lights.

I watched him as the darkness settled in the auditorium and enveloped his face. I wanted to ask how much he remembered from that day—if he remembered the car ride, the museum, the raspberries, the rain, the kiss. Maybe he didn’t, maybe he kissed people all the time in his normal, non-summer life that didn’t include me.

I learned nothing from the documentary. Oliver sat close to me in the seats and in the quiet lulls I could hear him breathe next to me; the monotone narration of the documentary was no competition to the intimate sound, familiar from the nights when he’d fallen asleep before me.

My mind wandered to Marzia and whether she had been right. Did Oliver think this was more than a platonic outing? Or was he merely grateful for the company of a friend in a new city of strangers?

The armrests were short and shallow, and his hand had wandered to my side of the seats once by accident, and he’d retreated it, ending its escape by firmly planting it on the armrest again.

Halfway through the show, when the narrator mentioned that the day on Jupiter was the shortest in our solar system, he leaned closer. A light breath puffed near my neck.

“How long is it, then?” he whispered but kept his eyes on the screen.

I hadn’t touched him all day, but the time spent apart melted away in the darkness, so I brought my lips to his ear when I replied. The skin behind his ear smelled warm and of his cologne. He had decided to wear it today, still the same one. I should know—I had gone and gotten it from a store in Chelsea a year ago. I only did one drop a day myself, so as not to run out.

“Nine hours, fifty-five minutes.”

Wishing for a reason to stay close to him but not finding one, I had to return to my side of the seat. I kept hoping he’d ask me something else, but he didn’t.

Instead, his hand visited my side of the seats for a second time towards the end of the show.

It rested on the outskirts of his thigh but by any definition, on my side and in my clear view even in the dark. The ceiling was swooshing with a simulated journey past the rings of Jupiter to the sounds of Mozart’s _Symphony No. 41_ , and when the _Molto Allegro_ began, his palm turned up. I lost my interest in the celestial dust clouds as I wondered whether that was an invitation and if yes, to what.

I shifted in my seat and moved my hand from my lap to my thigh, let it slide all the way out to my knee. His hand didn’t retreat, didn’t move or turn over, so I reached and touched the middle of his palm with my fingertips. His hand closed around them for a moment like a mimosa pudica closing its leaves at the slightest touch, but then the show ended, the lights came on and we let go.

After the show, Oliver invited me to come and see his apartment.

I always went home on the last Saturday of the month to have dinner with my parents, but I still had some time. We walked all the way uptown to Oliver’s place which was a studio, with only one bed.

“I thought you had roommates.”

“Not here. I can barely afford this place alone, but it’s worth it.”

This was my first glimpse into Oliver’s world. He hadn’t had much with him that summer and the house had been ours. Here, a bookcase towered in the corner, stacked with books on top of books instead of neat rows. I spotted the book on pole stars he had bought on our trip to town. Next to it, there were three or four more books on astronomy. I pulled one out.

“I’m taking a couple of astronomy classes on the side,” he explained as he took his sweater off and threw it on the bed. “The documentary was for one of them.”

I put the book back.

I looked out of the window onto 114th Street, and then noticed the grey rock on his nightstand. He walked over to me when I picked it up.

“It still doesn’t work,” he smiled. “I can still see you.”

“You always did.”

He took my hand in his, took the moon rock from my palm with the other. “And do you still see me?”

He was a doctoral student Oliver, dressed in fall clothing and a year older and wiser, the glow of summer gone and replaced with the responsibility of a new school and a new degree, but despite all that, he was still Oliver. _My Oliver_ , I would've wanted to think, but he was probably someone else’s by now.

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Someone told me about something called Angelica’s ring that can make the person invisible if it’s put in the mouth.”

“Who said that?”

“This French girl in New Hampshire. Apparently it’s from a French legend.”

“Oh.” I stared out the window. A bird flew past.

“It made me think of you and your rock.”

“Right.”

”Don’t look like that, Elio. She was an exchange student, a freshman. I was just tutoring her in physics.”

He hadn’t let go of my hand and now intertwined his fingers with mine. He pulled me to him and rested his forehead on mine.

Earlier in the day, I had thought that even if all he’d offer me were another six weeks that no one would know about, I would take it. If he’d offer his friendship, a friendship where we only talked about the planets and never fucked, I would take it. I would take anything as long as I could be around him, but I wasn’t so sure of it anymore. The moment of him holding my fingers in the dark of the planetarium had been the spark and the more he touched me, the more I wanted him.

“Are you allowed to do that?” I asked, when it became clear what he was doing.

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t there someone else now?”

He was puzzled. “Who would there be?”

“I don’t know. Those French girls. Or anyone. Everyone.” Someone whose jokes he laughed at like he had at Marzia’s.

He pulled back, curled his fingers at the back of my neck and made the hair there stand up. “There is no one else.”

I didn’t see how that was possible for someone with his looks and brains and charm and the entire Columbia University at his disposal. When I was the only person around, save for my parents, he had no choice. It had been understandable. But in the city, he couldn’t be wanting for company.

He laughed at me, very gently, when I told him that.

“The problem is,” he said, “that I keep comparing everyone to this one person I met one summer. And no one is as interesting, or talented, or as good of a kisser.”

I bit my lip. “Really? Have you tried on many?”

“One or two, but they were no match.”

I played with the buttons on his shirt. “And this person whom you met—“

“This boy,” he interrupted.

I looked up. “Yes, this boy. Does he know all that?”

“I hope he does now.”

“He hasn’t practiced that much since then,” I confessed and felt a flush coming up my neck.

“I thought I heard he’s in Juilliard now,” Oliver raised his brow.

“I meant— The other thing. He might not be such a good kisser anymore.”

“There’s only one way to find out, right?”

The kiss was warm and my lips had had so much practice that one summer that they remembered and were still conditioned to part for him. His arms were all around me and then he was pushing the books and clothes off of the bed and I was on his lap. He held my hands behind my back and kissed down the line of my throat.

I pulled my hands free and pushed them under and up his shirt. “Can you take this off?”

He reached behind him for the hem and pulled his shirt over his head in one move, confident like someone who was used to taking his shirt off in front of people. I could never have been that confident.

It left his hair disheveled and I wanted to hold him.

“And now mine.”

He smiled. “Arms up.”

I did as he said, and he rolled my shirt up and away, leaving me as vulnerable from the waist up as he was. He dropped the shirt on the floor and fixed something on the side of my hair.

I had missed his chest. I hugged him, skin to skin, and he kissed the side of my neck again, then hesitated and paused.

“You smell familiar.” He hadn’t caught it until now.

I blushed.

“Is that—?” he continued.

I nodded, embarrassed in the moment even though I had deliberately worn the cologne.

“Is it because of me?”

“It’s weird, right?” I admitted, trying to beat him to it and certain that my face was thoroughly red by now, but he only kissed me again at the spot where he had found the scent.

Maybe not too weird for him, then.

His thumb counted the vertebrae on my spine and I pressed my face tightly into the crook of his neck, so tightly that every bit of my face was in contact with his skin. His arms enclosed me and I wanted to be engulfed into his body, budded into him like a vesicle. So that he could never leave my body again.

His hands wandered up and down my back when I asked: “Will this be another six weeks?”

He knew what I meant.

Unlike that summer, there was no agreed-upon expiry date now, so if we started something, it would only end when one of us got bored with the other. Inevitably, it would be him. I would never get tired of him. But when that would happen, where would it leave me?

“I had already put you in a box,” I told him.

“Where am I now?”

“On the top shelf in my room back home.”

“Do you want to keep me there?”

His eyes told me that it wasn’t a rhetorical question. On one hand, I thought what a fool he was, not knowing that I would do anything to open that box; but on the other hand, I wasn’t sure if I was the fool, suddenly thinking we could do this, just like that.

“I don’t know what to think.” I pulled back and sat up on the bed. “Two hours ago, I was telling Marzia that you were just my father’s intern. And now I’m in your bed.”

Oliver reached to hold the tip of my chin. “Did you seduce all his interns?” He was teasing me.

I caught his hand between mine and kissed it. “Only one. But I was only able to keep him for one summer.”

The teasing smile turned serious. “He would’ve wanted to stay. And keep you.”

“I’m scared.”

“Of?”

“The time when this goes away. You came to the house and you were perfect, and if it seems too good to be true it usually is.”

“I’m not perf—”

“—So perfect that I fell for you and thought I had invented the feeling, because no way was it possible that there were other people going around feeling like that and the world was still able to function.” I placed his hand on my birthmark. “You see my scars and don’t make me hide them.”

“I never—”

I kept hearing him, but I wasn’t done. “It’s scary. I can’t help but think that there’ll be a moment when it stops.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“It already did once.”

He pulled me back to his arms. “Elio.”

I had missed this, my name on his lips. It didn’t sound the same coming from anyone else.

“I thought it was for the best, at the time.”

I listened to his heartbeat. Steady, then increasing when he admitted: “The letters were the best part of my week. But if you waited for them even half as eagerly as I did, I knew we had to stop before it got to be too much and I would hurt you even more.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My life back in New Hampshire wasn’t— I just couldn’t have you be a part of that. I knew that and yet, I let myself start thinking that maybe, one day, if I could just come up with a plan. But it wasn’t possible, so I had to stop. All of it. Thinking. Writing.”

I was still stuck on what he had said before that. “A plan?”

“A plan.”

“For more than six weeks?”

“For more than six weeks.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why me?” As much as I wanted it to be true, I couldn’t fathom how he’d want me, of all people. For more than six weeks.

Then it came to me.

He would want to keep having sex with me, to satisfy what he couldn’t get elsewhere, but that’d be it. I wouldn’t exist outside of this room.

“Is it just because of this?” I gestured between our bodies and then dared him to look at me. Yet, I wasn’t sure I’d be strong enough to say no, even if he’d admit that that’s exactly what he had meant.

“Elio.” This time my name was laced with sadness, the kind that one has over a matter they can’t believe they haven’t been able to fix. “No. It’s because of this.”

He put his hands on my temples and kissed my forehead.

When he’d managed to convince me that he wanted more than just trysts in his small Morningside Heights apartment, I said I might still want to take things slow. We had fallen so quickly into what had once been and my mind was having trouble keeping up. I also asked what that ‘more’ was, then.

“Like go for a run. Like we used to. In fact, I still haven’t done my run for today. Would you like to go? For old times’ sake. And we could talk.”

I’d forgotten the existence of clocks for a while, but now looked at the time. It had sped up while we’d been in bed and now I had less than thirty minutes to get to the dinner table my mother had set.

I pulled myself away from Oliver but then embraced him again. “I can’t go. Not now. I wish I could, but I can’t. I promised to go home for dinner.”

He wasn’t discouraged. “Tomorrow, then?”

“Yes, tomorrow. Unless you want to come for dinner?” I asked without thinking ahead or realizing how many questions there would be if I walked in with him.

When he’d left, my parents had known something was going on, but they hadn’t pressed. We never talked about it, but by not asking they told me they knew. However, I wasn’t sure they’d be able to hold off on their questions now, but I wouldn’t have any answers until I had gotten my head straight for myself first.

Oliver seemed to understand. “It would be great to see them again, but maybe next time.”

“There’ll be a next time?”

“I think there will be,” he smiled.

I put on my shirt, kissed his palm and promised that I would be back the next day.


	9. The North Star

The Sunday afternoon was warmer and clearer than the one before had been. Half of Manhattan were running their laps in Central Park and the other half strolled with their children. The clacks of horse hooves could be heard in the distance on the traverse roads as the carriages entertained tourists, but when one ventured on the footpaths there were stretches of silence, the only interruptions coming from birdsong or another runner’s footsteps passing us by.

Oliver suggested we run his regular route and we had run half a mile when he started.

“I lie to ninety-nine percent of the people in my life.”

“What?”

“I told you, I’m not perfect. None of them know that when I broke up with Sarah in high school, it wasn’t because I wanted to concentrate on my SATs. They don’t know that when we go to the movies I don’t look at Princess Leia but at Han Solo.”

I wondered when my parents had figured out why I liked all those Westerns.

Oliver continued: “They liked the headmaster’s son, the track and field star at New Hampshire U, the Columbia scholar to-be. They don’t even know the real me.”

I was quiet. Silenced, rather. I remembered how he’d told me not to hide.

“Which percent am I?” I asked.

“The one.”

“I didn’t know you were a track and field star.”

“I told you that I run.”

“Yes, but not that you were a star.”

“Exactly. But you wanted to be around me when it was just me. What was left of me when I was taken out of my surroundings. Anyway, you asked why you. That’s why. And your mouth.”

“My mouth?”

“Because of every word that comes out of it. And the other things it does, too,” he added and bumped my arm, grinning and trying to make light of the fact that no one in the world knew him.

We stopped at the drinking fountain near the tennis house. There was no one else around; I drank first and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand as Oliver took his turn. There were pockets of sweat under his armpits as he bent above the pulsing fountain.

He swallowed a mouthful of the water. “I told you I would’ve wanted to keep you. But it wouldn’t have worked in the town where I lived. And the last thing I wanted was for you to become part of the charade. With you, I had been able to be myself for once and I wanted that to stay untainted.”

Where was this leading? Was I now tainting his new life in New York?

He sensed my climbing unrest and pulled me closer by the hem of my shirt. “And after I saw you outside that coffee shop last week, my first instinct was to let you be. To not muddle your life with my charade.”

“But you were the one who sent me the note. You invited me to the Hayden,” I reminded him.

“I know. Because knowing you were here somewhere,” he waved his hand under the fall sky, “—made it impossible to stay away.”

I smiled.

“I know what you mean.”

He smiled back and bent over the fountain again, cupped water into his palm and ran it through his hair.

“Ready?”

I nodded and off we went again.

We ran along the busy path circling the Reservoir, speaking nothing for long periods of time. When we reached the northernmost point of the route, I brought it up.

“Is this a charade, now?”

“Not with you.”

“But if we happened to run into one of your friends, would I be an old friend? A mentor’s son?”

He sensed the accusation and looked pained. “It’s not that simple.”

I shouldn’t have pressed him about that. No one knew about me either, except Marzia now.

“I know. Only Marzia knows about me. And my parents, I think. I think they found out when you left.”

“Did you tell them anything?”

“No. But they comforted me and acted like they had said goodbye to a son, too.” Then the question that I had come here to ask to begin with. “What do you want from me?”

I had expected him to get frustrated, maybe not know what I meant. Instead, he laughed.

“What do I want from you?” he repeated and turned the question on me. “What do you want from me, Elio?”

“I don’t know. To be with you. Around you. Near you.” _Within you._

“There you go.”

He took a hold of my hand and caused me to fall out of step as he lifted it to his lips.

On a quiet stretch near The Loch we weren’t that far from Oliver’s apartment anymore, but he veered off the running path and once out of the view, pulled me to him to kiss me.

“I had wanted to do that,” he said, after.

“For how long?”

“Since we left the fountain. Or, since the first time we jogged together and you told me you wanted a brother.”

The water flowed quietly in the creek; this was an area that the casual visitor rarely ventured into. Had the entire route been like this, it would’ve been like our morning runs that summer. Just us and the water and the trees.

“Brothers don’t kiss like that,” I said, still feeling his tongue at the roof of my mouth.

“Oh, really?” he asked and kissed me again. “Seems like you’ve got yourself something else, then.”

Back at Oliver’s apartment, we took turns at taking a shower.

I had sweated through my t-shirt and shorts and tried to tell him I should go back to my dorm and change.

“You can borrow these,” he said and handed me a pair of red shorts. “They’re clean, my friend forgot them here. He’s not exactly your size but slimmer than me anyway.”

“Friend?”

“Yes, friend, you goose. He plays lacrosse and is into his third girlfriend this semester. We run together sometimes. Try them on.”

After the shower, I waited by the fridge as Oliver found beers for us. The borrowed shorts kept falling off.

“I gave them to you on purpose,” he teased when I pulled them up for the hundredth time.

“Easy to take off?”

“If you want them to be.”

Oliver hadn’t bothered with a shirt after the shower and he never gave me one to borrow in the first place.

“Your hair is wet,” he said tenderly and petted my hair.

“So is yours.”

We hadn’t kissed since the moment at The Loch, but it was only a matter of time.

He took a pull of his beer and I watched his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. Here, it wasn’t going to be just a kiss. It would be a seal to everything we’d talked about, a promise from me to trust him that this would be different, maybe a promise from him to chip away at the charade.

I let him take another pull of his beer before I took it from his hand and put it on the counter along with mine. I put my hands on the sides of his face and he was still tall, so I reached up to my toes.

The kiss never ended. We took breaths but returned to the same kiss, stumbled from the fridge to his desk to his bed but it was still the same deal-sealing kiss. We would do this, and it would not end on the second week of August.

I had told him I wanted to take things slow but all those wishes evaporated when I was lying on top of him.

“I’ve missed this,” he said.

My tongue mapped his collarbone. “Missed what?”

“Your weight on me. Your hair under my chin.”

I pressed my hips against him.

“And that.”

He was hard under me and I suspected he wouldn’t need much persuading. “I know I said I wanted to take things slow. But— could we do something?”

“What do you want to do?” He wasn’t making fun of me and my change of mind, like I had thought he might. He never had, and I wondered if I one day would stop doubting him.

“This?” I said and pressed the heel of my palm against his bulge. The pressure made him pant.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Everything.”

I had thought about it. A lot that summer, even more after his note had arrived in my mailbox at the dorm.

We’d never done it and I didn’t know if he had with anyone else, either. I certainly hadn’t.

I wanted to start anew, not only revisit the old but bring him to me in the most intimate of ways.

I slid off of him, to lie on my stomach. He got the hint and placed his hand on my lower back next to my borrowed shorts, slipped one finger underneath. I arched my back to let him know he was on the right track. Because how did one ask for this? _I want you inside my body, and as long as it’s you, any part will do, even though I do play favorites._ One couldn’t just come out and say that.

He made me say it.

It wasn’t until we were both naked and he’d kissed all over my stomach and all over my back, but then he leaned in from behind and asked my ear: “What do you want, Elio?”

My ear didn’t want to reply, so he gave options.

His breath moved to the nape of my neck, and lower down my back, and lower, and ended with a kiss on the crease at the very bottom of my spine: “This?”

A sweep of one of his fingers between the cheeks. “Or this?”

My head answered for my ear, and it shook no to both. It turned to face him.

“I want all of you.”

He kissed me multiple times and in between, asked if I was sure, but it wasn’t to deter me and he hoped that I’d say yes.

I did say yes.

I started to wonder if he’d done this before, maybe with one of those people he had tried on for a kiss, because he reached for his nightstand, unhesitant, and pulled out a bottle.

“What’s— Oh.”

“I want you to be comfortable.”

I didn’t want to be comfortable; I wanted to feel him so badly that I would ache in order to make it real, but the sensation of his now cool, slick finger touching me and slipping inside a little made me forget everything else. He wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me up gently to my knees. I rested my head on my forearms on the bed, and two hours ago we had been watching families sail boats in Central Park.

At first, I didn’t like it as much as I had thought. His fingers were doing too much and not enough at the same time, it was a strange feeling and yet not transformative enough. It changed when he went deeper and hit the spot. I brushed it off as an accident but then he did it again and had to hold me up by my waist because my knees buckled, from the surprise but even more so from the pleasure. I felt heated all over.

“Is that good?” he asked.

“Yes,” I managed.

He did it with his finger for the third time but made me wait, just feeling his fingers fully inside me until I finally croaked between my hands: “Please!”

I could’ve easily come just from this, him pushing a button and watching me unravel, but he reached for his nightstand again and I heard him unwrap the condom. He reached under me and gave my cock a tender stroke because anything more substantial would’ve meant the end of things for me, and then told me to lie down, his voice coarse and strained from want.

When I turned around, it was the first time I got a good look at his face. The look in his eyes matched the tone of his voice and I hazily thought that I might also come just from seeing him want me like this. I spread my legs and bent my knees at his slightest suggestion, and he lowered himself on top of me, inside me and seeped into my every cell.

By the time he pulled out and I had come all over myself I was warm goo, a puddle with no bones. The ache that I had been yearning for earlier was now there as a souvenir, while the heat kept living on my cheeks and my pulse pounding in my ears.

“Was this your first time doing that?” Oliver asked after he’d brought a wet towel, reminiscent of our first time together, and cleaned me up.

“Mm-hmm. I haven’t had sex with anyone but you,” I then added.

“So that means that you and Marzia...”

“No! Why would you think that?”

“She was quite handsy with you.”

“We kissed once, but that was it.”

“You kissed her, or she kissed you?”

“What’s the difference?”

“There’s a difference.”

I felt secure enough to tease him. “Are you saying you’re jealous? I kissed her, because she wanted me to. But it didn’t change my world in any way. Not the way our first kiss did.”

“It turned mine upside down,” he whispered.

We looked at the time. It was already evening and we had spent the entire afternoon in bed.

“Do you want to stay here tonight?” Oliver asked.

“Can I? I have an early class tomorrow.”

“So do I. We can get up early together. Rise and shine. Head out together.”

“Yes,” I agreed, knowing as he did, that we would most likely be far too reluctant to give each other up when the time came, and would both end up missing our classes.

He pulled me to him.

“So what was it, that plan of yours?” I asked and played with the skin that slid back and forth over his collarbone.

“Let’s see.” He fitted his chin on the top of my head. “I thought that I would move to New York, and hope that one day when the stars aligned, I would run into you, coming out of a coffee shop. Sleepy eyes, holding a freshly brewed cup.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.” I wondered if I’d ever find out whether there was any truth in that, dressed as a joke, but he continued: “Besides, I almost stopped a boy on campus two weeks ago because he looked like you from the back. I thought you might’ve come to visit your father.”

“And you thought that if you just saw me again, this would all still be here between us?”

“I had a strong feeling it might.”

“How did you know?”

He thought for a while, then tugged at the curtain and made me look at the thin sliver of the early evening sky that we could see from his bed. The citrine glow extended over the city like it sometimes did right before the sun started to set.

“Can you see your North Star?” he asked.

“What? No.” His question was nonsensical: even if we’d seen more of the sky, it was still far too light to see any stars.

“But is it still there?” he asked. It reminded me of my father’s dinner lectures. Oliver would’ve made a perfectly adequate professor, except for the fact that he kept kissing my ear while he asked his questions.

“Yes, of course it is.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s always been there. It doesn’t disappear from the universe just because you can’t see it for a while. You just need to wait for the right time, and it’ll be there again.”

“There you go,” he said and kissed me on the mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so, so much for reading and all the support. It means more than you know.
> 
> I’m going to take a little break now and hang out here only as a reader for a while, but I do have a couple ideas brewing so I do hope to return with something new again at some point.
> 
> In the meantime, if you have any messages or questions for me, they’ll reach me either here below or on my Tumblr: [angel-in-new-york-city](http://angel-in-new-york-city.tumblr.com)
> 
> Take care of yourselves and loved ones and I hope to see you later <3


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